mainly his photos and devotees (experiences at the community of the man now called Avatar Adi Da
Samraj)

by DC

A few years ago I visited the community of the teacher now called
Avatar Adi Da Samraj, Adi Da, and even better, Da for short. This came up
in conversation with a friend who asked how the visit went. I groaned
because I didn’t want to get into it again, but, I said, I’d put it down
on my website, cuke.com. When I get tired of one of my own stories, it’s a
good time to write it down - that seems to help me to empty it from the
brain ram. It starts with the phone ringing.

An old friend of mine who’d been in the San Francisco Zen Center for a
number of years, and now has been with Da's group for considerably more
years, called me up and said that she missed me and would love to get
together. I always like to see her so we made a date for her to drop by my
home in Sebastopol. We talked for a while and she mentioned a few times,
as she had in the past, that I should come up and be her guest at
Persimmon, the Daist community in Lake County where they studied Daism and
practiced Adidam, the Way of the Heart. She said we’d have lots of fun
and, prompted by my going on about an old girlfriend, mentioned that there
were a number of available, attractive women there who might just swoon
over me. That’s a sure way to get my interest.

She brought with her an album of photos taken by Da. She said that
photography was his focus these days. They were somewhat intriguing black
and white photos of - all I can remember is nude women - but there was
more. Now she really is a good old friend and she’s funny as heck and
interesting, but the way she was relating to me reminded me of someone
trying to sell Amway products. Every once in a while when I’m trying to
sell something, like a new creation or the Nuclear Freeze, I hit up
everyone I can, so I didn’t mind – but I noticed. She came back the
following week with her husband who was a cool and down to earth guy whom
I enjoyed talking with. There were follow up calls.

I remembered hearing of Da, this man who was born Franklin Jones, way
back in the early seventies when he was publishing his first books under
the name of Bubba Free John. Why didn’t he keep that name? It’s sorta
cool. Some students at Tassajara, the SFZC’s monastery, had a book or two
of his. I’d read a few chapters and they seemed pretty solid. I have a
hazy recollection of him writing about hovering in some sort of very lofty
state when he decided to be born into this incarnation in order to become
the World Teacher. That sort of approach didn’t interest me.

But did I want to visit his community? It seemed like such a chore. I
definitely wasn’t interested in Da as a teacher or doing more than just
dropping by. I knew a little about Da – he’d been a student of the famous
Hindu guru, Muktananda, with whom he'd had a split, had been a Scientology
Auditor, had written upward of seventy books, had many highfalutin names,
and claimed he was the most enlightened person in the history of the West
which later would expand to become the whole world which would become the
only being in the history of the universe to attain, even in the future,
the seventh level of realization or whatever. I knew that a lot of people
were extremely impressed with his books, presence, and teaching. I also
knew that there were many people including ex-devotees who were awfully
critical of him - the way he’d isolated himself and the way he related to
students, especially in the more extreme periods of uninhibited sex and
intoxicant experimentation. There had been lawsuits about clerical abuse -
causing emotional distress, false imprisonment, assault - that resulted in
out of court settlements. There had been some exposes, one written for the
San Francisco Chronicle by my friend Katie Butler (who has the goods on me
as well).

Back in the eighties Ken Wilber had asked me to come with him to a
darshan with Da. Da had been in Fiji for years but now he was back in the
States and going around doing these public events where people would sit
in a room with him just to soak up his vibes. No lecture. There was a
charge of $75 but Ken was a VIP and could get me in free. He said he
wanted to see if I'd feel anything special being in the presence of the
man who was called Da Free John back then - or that might have been when
he was called Da Love Ananda. I could join Ken in an official zooming
Persimmon limo. There was the lure of excitement, speed, celebrity,
privilege, enlightenment, and a grand time to be had. But I told Ken that
I surely wouldn’t feel anything special, that I was immune to transcendent
vibrations, and tend to perceive everyone as the same. I was busy working
on music too and the thought of leaving what I was doing and riding in a
car for a couple of hours to sit in a room with a self-proclaimed
God-incarnate, just to catch his radiance, didn’t entice me. So I said no,
but I always had a touch of regret about not going at least for purposes
of sociological research.

Back then Ken had been the recipient of a lot of heat for his praise of
Da’s writings, but he maintained that no one had written more vividly
about the different levels of consciousness and enlightenment, that Da was
the clearest exponent of the perennial philosophy, and that any serious
student of higher callings should read his books. Ken wasn’t a devotee.
He’d just called it as he saw it and that is a pretty impressive
recommendation (Since then he’s asked the group not to use his name for
promotional purposes though privately still affirming his immense respect
for Da). Ken gave me one of Da’s books, the Dawn Horse Testament,
which he’d superlatively praised. They’d shipped him a whole box of them.
Almost every noun of any significance was capitalized.

There have been a handful of students from the Zen Center and people I
know otherwise who became devotees, who have stayed with Da, and who are
enchanted with him as a teacher - even though they have almost no contact
with him. They have a strong devotional relationship with him and they’ve
had experiences of love and light, samadhi and kundalini that I don’t
doubt are real, life changing, and profound. There are many reports, even
from his detractors, that he has what appears to be what I'd call the
psychic ability to trigger altered states in some people. For one
instance, I have a good old Zen friend who went to a Da event long ago
cynical and yeah-sure and then Da walked by her and she had the most
ecstatic experience of her life.

I've heard first person accounts of deep transcendent experience
happening to people associated with various teachers and paths - born
again Christians, followers of Hindu gurus like Guru Ma and Papa-ji,
attendees of channelers, students of shamans, Sufi dancers, Buddhists. It
tends to lock them in and make them think they've found the Only Way. Many
people have told me that with the teachers and paths they’re on now they
have found the enlightenment or bliss or peace that they’d chased after
unsuccessfully with Zen and some say that nobody in the Zen world seems to
have much enlightenment or, if they do, to be able to pass it on to
others. And in the Zen world, some say that none seem to have less to show
for it than the students of my dear teacher Shunryu Suzuki. After all,
when Professor Arthur Deikman [see his interview on cuke.com] first met
Suzuki in the sixties and questioned him about consciousness, Suzuki said
he didn't know anything about it, that he just tried to help his students
learn to hear the birds singing.

I’m reminded of what a Christian minister told me once at Tassajara.
This was after Suzuki had died. I was the head monk at the time and the
minister was there as a student for a week or so. I remember his name –
Pierce Johnson. He’d written a book called Dying Into Life and had
been a chaplain at the Claremont colleges in Pasadena. He’d spent lots of
time with young people on spiritual quests. He asked to speak to me and so
we got together and he said, with some frustration in his voice, that he’d
participated in the practice of various spiritual communities – born again
Christian, Hindu like Hari Krishna, Buddhist, Sufi, Mooney, Children of
God, etc. But, he said, there was something he’d encountered with the
Zennies at Tassajara that he had never experienced before. With all of the
other groups, when he asked the students what they had gotten out of it,
they would have a lot to say. They’d gotten enlightened or gotten over all
of their problems or were happy or filled with God’s love or something,
but that when he asked the students at Tassajara what they’d gotten from
their Zen practice, they would respond with, "Oh, I don’t know," or "I’m
not sure," or similar uninspiring replies. He wanted to know how this
could be and could I explain it? I can’t remember what I said to him but I
was quite pleased. Why was I pleased? I don’t know – just my perverse
attitude about it all I guess. Or maybe it's that I don't easily trust
belief or any final conclusions.

So I chewed on this Persimmon thing for a while and, even though I had
plenty of resistance to the idea of accepting my friend’s invitation, I
knew I’d at least enjoy being with her and her husband. And I was curious,
had the time, and thought, okay, I’ll go check this trip out.

I arrived at Persimmon at the appointed hour of five in the evening and
was greeted by my old friend and another woman I’d known well years before
- back in the formative days of the incredibly successful Fort Mason
Foundation (I was, for the first two years, the host of the SFZC's
restaurant, Greens, at Fort Mason). This woman was now in charge of the
Persimmon guest program which I was a participant in. The purpose of this
program was to expose selected guests to the photographic art of Beloved,
as they frequently called Da, and to give us a little of his teaching -
just a bit of background so we could have an inkling of where he was
coming from when he snapped the shutter.

After dinner, we were asked to stay to get an orientation in Da’s
teaching – not to try to convert us the orienter made clear, chuckling and
quoting something light-hearted Da had said about not trying to persuade
people to become devotees. No, we were there to see his photos which were
the direct expression of his eminently transcendent understanding. The
orientation went on till pretty late and, by the end, I was one of the
only ones, out of about twelve of us, who hadn’t bowed out to go to bed. I
enjoyed hearing about Da’s teaching though the fellow was so into it he
only stopped when it was clear he’d soon be talking to himself. I can’t
remember what was said except for Da being really super-enlightened and a
vague recollection of how concerned Da was about world peace. Very good.
There was something about him bringing on a storm in the South Pacific to
stop something – maybe nuclear testing. That was pretty impressive – and I
was also impressed that this was taken to be the unquestioned truth.

I was touched that Da had said that, as he got older, he saw art as a
way to deal with all the suffering we endure on this plane. Because of
this and especially since he thought he wasn’t getting through to enough
people with his writings, he was turning his efforts toward uplifting
mankind through art. There seemed to be an idea that this was something
the whole world was waiting for. It was obvious that the hope was that the
individuals of these guest groups would experience his photos and spread
the word far and wide. There was a sense of urgency.

I glanced at some of Da’s books including an encyclopedic set of his
(which they write "His") complete works and I noticed that there were a
whole lot of books and even more names of Da I hadn’t even heard or seen
before.

When we were all still there, we were each given a pad of legal size
yellow paper and were asked to write Da a message, for instance,
expressing gratitude for being invited to be Beloved’s guest and to
experience the gift of his photography in this weekend program - which
non-comped people paid upwards of $300 for.

I wrote something like, "Hi there. Great to be here. I’ve got some
friends who are students of yours and always wanted to come up and check
this place out. Thanks a lot." The fellow read it and sighed and said that
they had in mind something a little more – what did he imply? – something
a little more polite and respectful and grateful and maybe a tad
devotional. The others guests seemed to be more in tune with the
expectations of our hosts. But I said that that’s what I had to say and
that I wouldn’t change it. He was obviously disappointed but pleasant.
People there were always, in my experience, pleasant.

I stayed with my friend and her husband in their charming little house
near some other residence facilities and visited with other devotees and
drank wine with them and rolled some cigarettes with their tobacco and
smoked a little bit of pot with them. I was told that Da had, I think in
recent years, said that it was fine for his students to smoke some pot if
they wished. He even smoked it for his glaucoma. They are not puritanical
at all, which made me feel at ease. I looked at the women and wondered if
there might be some possibilities of a different kind, but I realized in
time that no woman there would be at all interested in me if my life were
not focused on Da, so I dropped that line of hope. Almost all of the talk
was about Da or his teaching or photography or what he ate for breakfast.
I joked that I was sure if I asked what time it was that I’d be told the
time and that then the person with the time would say wistfully, "Beloved
has a beautiful watch," or maybe "Beloved always knows what time it is
without a watch." Come to think of it, I say that second one about myself.
Anyway, when I made this joke, it was taken in good humor.

My friend got me up for optional meditation the next morning. We went
to breakfast in the communal dining room. It was good. The people were
friendly and fairly tingling with high expectation at how we guests would
react to the presentations to come.

The morning started with a tour of the grounds and buildings. It’s a
pretty large place, an old resort. Da doesn’t live there anymore. He said
that it was too claustrophobic with all his students surrounding him. He
started hanging out in the nearby home of one of his devotees and the
group bought it for him. The tour was led by a woman who had us all sit in
the grass a couple of times to take a break to listen to her read from
some of Da’s writings. She made a point that one unique aspect of Adidam
is that his students are not to be attached even to him or his teaching. I
couldn’t help but make a comment that that was boiler plate spiritual
practice attitude and she got a little vexed and snapped a contradiction
back at me.

In our first exposure to Da’s photography, we were led to a spacious
tent structure with an imposing spiritual name. Da has a distinctive way
with words so that I continued to encounter these significant names –
though I can’t remember them. It was built of white canvas with an
entryway and corridor where we passed by giant reproductions of photos
that he’d taken. They were maybe seven feet by four feet, black and white
and mainly featured naked women. They were tasteful and serious. Then we
went into the main room and sat in chairs and waited. Before long about
eight people came out from the right side, each of them dressed in black
with white gloves and each solemnly carrying a Da photo maybe two feet
high mounted on some sturdy backing, offerings that they then placed on
easels so we could admire them from where we were before going up to
admire them one by one. We could take all the time we wanted. There was a
theme to them consisting of various poses of a naked bearded man, an old
SF Zennie and formidable scholar of Korean classics, a middle aged
dark-haired naked woman, a younger dark-haired naked woman, a ladder, and
an opening in the ceiling. These photographs were in a progression that
had some significance but I never much interpret art – I just look at it.
And I don’t look at it for too long so after a while I went back to my
seat and waited which was relaxing. This guy's really into it, I thought.
I especially liked the naked women which I must say made the whole weekend
much more agreeable.

So we saw these photos and then were asked to write down our
impressions, something we were given ample time to do. And then another
group of eight people dressed in black with white gloves walked slowly out
and removed the photos. I was just thinking, well that was interesting,
when the original eight people in black came out with a new set of photos.
Oh, there's more. And then there was more again. This went on and on and
on for a few hours and I was getting restless and hungry but they finally
stopped coming out with new ones. Then we were given extra time to
finalize our comments. My contribution consisted entirely of a large
exclamation mark vertically covering the page. My friend who was
accompanying me for the whole weekend just giggled at my punctuational
comment, but the fellow who was collecting the sheets of paper suggested
that I say more and that it wasn’t an impression that he could communicate
on the telephone. He said he had to go call Da right away and read all of
our comments and that they expected something more. I said that that was
my impression and that all he had to do was to say that I’d drawn a big
exclamation mark. There was indeed more that I could have written as I had
counted the number of photos and groups they were in and could have said
something about that. I like numbers.

During lunch some devotees joined us and I think my friend was under
minor pressure to get me to write more. She asked me how I liked the
program so far and I said that I wasn’t really inclined to be in groups or
classes or to be restricted like this but it was interesting and that I’d
made a commitment to do what I was expected to do - except write what they
expected. She encouraged me to write as much as I could but only what I
wished. The lunch was good too - wholesome, natural fare.

After a break there was the afternoon program in another building where
there were devotees dancing to some techno music and some sort of light
trip. But they weren’t dancing with each other – they were dancing with Da
- so to speak. There were big photos of him up on the wall there and they
seemed to be pretty blessed out boogying beneath them. These people paid
an admission charge of $10.

The music stopped and we all took seats and faced three screens, each
with its own automated slide projector. What followed was a several hour
slide-noir presentation cum more music of an ever-changing series of black
and white photos that Da had done with a carnival theme. What I see now in
my mind, and this was several dozen moons ago, is puppets, carved
merry-go-round horses, and naked women plus it was all dark and a bit
threatening. I thought he must have been influenced by old Orson Wells
movies or something existential from back then. It all seemed to be pretty
artistic in a shadowy way, but it was hard to think of it as art after it
had gone on for a such a long, long time. I was feeling a bit trapped in
what was becoming an ordeal. I persevered.

I did write Da a letter that night at dinner on my yellow pad. I said
that this to me was endurance art and I pledged that I was in for the
duration. It was like being in a Zen sesshin with painful legs and
troubled mind and only the vow to stay in one’s seat till the end. "You
dish it out, I can take it," I wrote and the message was then collected
with the others to be read to Da. Can it be? Yes I think that after dinner
there was an evening program of Da’s photography, one that went on for
only an hour and a half. But I’m not sure – things were getting a bit
blurry as was the line between reality and imagination.

The next morning after breakfast there was another seemingly
interminable program with the slide setup and it went on and on, a bit
dizzying, but I kept to my seat like a ship captain in a fierce storm
bound by rope to the mast.

And then, after whatever we wrote at lunch, we gathered to be briefed
on the high point of the weekend, something I’d been hearing about since I
arrived. We were to join in with a group of Da’s students in a darshan. My
friend was excited because Da has lots of students and, even though she’s
been around for some years, she doesn’t get to go to darshan as often as
she’d like and on that day she got to go because I was her guest. She and
other devotees whom I’d become acquainted with would mention the upcoming
audience with enthusiasm. They were happy for me and couldn’t wait to hear
my reaction. In the orientation we were told, for one thing, that Da
doesn’t perceive the world in the way that we do, that, for instance, when
he sees his hand, he doesn’t see the same old solid flesh that we do but a
translucent field of energy inter-connected with the whole universe.
Hey, I’ve had acid, so I can dig it – though it’s been a long time.

We drove to the staging area. There were people coming and going, on
cell phones, standing at doors. There were cars parked there, some
expensive large ones that seemed like they were for important people like
ambassadors. We sat in a circle on a lawn outside, meditating, preparing
for the great opportunity that awaited, and then we walked up a road to a
house where there were attendants outside smiling at our good fortune. I
entered a room and sat on a cushion with about thirty others pretty much
filling the space up. There was a dais in front of us. Then five women
came in, his harem, dressed in black. They were strong, confident,
attractive women whose ages spanned several decades. I felt a pang of
jealousy and thought about equitable distribution. One of them, a young
Asian woman, sat in proper Japanese seiza (on shins) by a sliding side
door and watched attentively for Da’s arrival. There was moaning coming
from some of those who waited. Then she slid open the door and heavy
breathing, sighs, and soft calls of "Da!" slowly built. Da entered
peacefully and sat down on his dais where he maintained a meditative
composure and smiled slightly and benevolently as he looked about the room
slowly and deliberately. He's built a little like me - sort of tubby.
Balding as well. There was more vocalizing, some people were swooning,
maybe even fainting. This went on for about thirty minutes and then he got
up and left.

My friend and the other woman I knew, the one who was in charge of this
guest program, talked to me before I left. They wanted to know what my
experience was of darshan with Beloved and I said it was very enjoyable
and peaceful. They pried for more but I said that I was too far gone to be
reached by even the most enlightened being in the universe past, present,
and future and that I didn't have more to say. They laughed and then
changed the subject.

They wanted to know if I could give them the names and contact
information of any other people, especially influential people naturally,
whom I thought would enjoy spending the weekend being a guest or paying
for one of these events. Maybe I could call some of these people up and
encourage them to participate in a guest weekend. They had a few names in
mind of people they knew I knew. I told them that I would never recommend
to anyone that they undergo what I'd just undergone, that I could not
submit anyone to this assault. I said they have no sense of limits and
they wouldn't get any names from me, that everything's too fanatically
centered on Da.

I thought of the lab I'd visited on the tour with so much work going on
with his photos being blown up and mounted and added that to everything
else I'd taken in and was struck with the enormous amount of help both in
terms of people and financing that Da gets. What about everyone else? Do
they do anything, any art of their own to deal with all the pain, or is
everyone's sole purpose just to attend to Da?

Rather than help them, I said I'd like for them to help me. All that I
asked for was that they send one person, just one, to help me with my
work. I have tons I want to do and am all alone. They laughed. I asked
them if they knew what they, in their overflowing devotion, came across
like? I said they were unbearable, like someone in the throws of new love.
They laughed again - shamelessly.

I did finally agree to talk to one person very well connected in the
art world - he'd been the curator of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, knew
something of Da, and he was someone who could fend for himself. But I told
them I'd warn him what he'd be getting into. They were pleased and
grateful.

Driving out of the mountainous area where Persimmon is nestled, I felt
like a wild animal released from a cage and put a tape of Taj Mahal's
Giant Step into the tape deck. I'd done it and I was glad I had, but
boy, was I relieved to get out of there.

So that's the story of my visit to Da's community as I remember it.
It's been a while so some of the details may not be right - I just told it
as ever-changing memory presented it to me. I know that it's not quite
fair for me to foist my impression of Persimmon on others - when observed
from the outside, the qualities we cherish about many of our most precious
moments are not communicated accurately and what comes across is strange
and irritating - lovers, men's groups hugging, people with their dogs. The
taste of the visit to Persimmon, I'd say on reflection, was a bit acerbic,
made my mouth pucker.

A couple of young fellows I'd met at Tassajara during the summer came
up to stay with me. We sat in the gazebo in my back yard. They were into a
post-Da study group that concentrated on the teaching of Da without Da and
were involved with a Ken Wilber study group as well. One of them said that
he thought that Da had gone astray and was on the biggest possible ego
trip imaginable and gotten paranoid and abusive and he said that even if
Da were the World Teacher that he wasn't interested in having him as a
teacher. My thoughts exactly. A bird was chirping from a high branch.

On the wall above a desk in my old Sebastopol house was a small flier
for an event to expose people to the teaching of Da. It said something
like, "The long awaited God man is here." There was a photo of him and his
most recent name, and it announced an event where you can learn that – I
think I’ve got this right - "Tolerance + cooperation = peace" and in
superscript after the word peace was the trademark sign. There was to be a
video featuring Da and a presentation on his teaching. There was a charge
too – something like seven dollars. I kept this flier when I moved, but
it’s packed away somewhere. Must find it and get it back up on the wall.

“Quandra Loka #231," 2003, pig-
mented inks on canvas, 60 x 40".

Relevant Links -
there's lots more about Da on these sites and on the web.
Just search for Adi Da, Daism, Adidam and other words that seem uniquely
pertinent.